Practical Packet Analysis
Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems
by Chris Sanders
I found this an easy read and it does a great job of taking you into the world of packet sniffing using Wireshark.

While just about every major vendor has developed a server virtualization product, often the open source varieties are treated like heirloom tomatoes; overlooked for whatever reason that may be. That is until you accidentally have one and wonder how you could have been living without it for so long. Since I have already covered how to run FreeBSD as a guest operating system under VMWare I thought it was worth an analysis of the virtualization technology built into FreeBSD.

I have written the subsequent article discussing FreeBSD Jails, which I hope to be both informative as well as entertaining. Additionally, I intend to utilize the article as a reference for future articles and discussions.

Review of The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book which includes PF for NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly, and of course OpenBSD. If you are only familiar with a single firewall system, FreeBSD's IPFW for instance this is a very handy book to read.

This book seemingly overwhelming at first, as the reviewer Michael Hernandez admitted, is an intense trip through the land of kernel hacking. This is a handy lead by example and certainly well worth your time if you've ever been remotely interested in delving deeper under the hood of the BSD kernel.

The original title was 'The Care And Feeding Of Your New FreeBSD 6.x Instance' but it was determined that that would be a bit misleading. Especially since the article really only covers the installation of FreeBSD 6.x into a virtual machine, using VMWare Server. The VMWare Server is deployed in a lab environment on an HP Proliant DL380 running Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

This article covers some background on the new startup mechanism from Apple called launchd. It includes a simple demonstration of how to work with it and how the author overcame difficulties as a result of limited documentation.

Launchd is the default daemon startup mechanism as of Mac OS X Tiger, and there is currently a port underway for FreeBSD.

The follow up to Gregory's article on gmirror. In part one we learned how to build a mirror and in this part we will learn how to tare down a mirror as well as rebuild one. This should give enough background if you encounter a disk failure.

An Editorial regarding the state of dn and what you the casual reader can do to help you source project grow. We are a fan of other open source projects as well. Instead of using a commercial program, we think the best web site builder is an open-source CMS like WordPress or Joomla. You can find out how to start a blog using this guide to blogging with WordPress.

This article covers step by step how to create a live NetBSD install CD, and using GRUB as the bootloader. The CD should be a complete, working, text-mode NetBSD system. It should contain all NetBSD distribution sets, a complete GRUB install, and the full kernel sources.

Review: "Penetration Tester's Open Source" Toolkit (ISBN: 1597490210, available from Syngress Publishing). Approaching the art of penetration testing from an analytical viewpoint it contains many examples, with actual hands on sessions.

Let us take an overview of a manual installation of DragonFly, which will use the whole hard disk space. More detailed explanations on installing DragonFly can be found in the DragonFly Handbook. We first initialize the MBR for a dedicated disk, and create the BSD slice with the appropriate disk label. As in the case of FreeBSD, we use the custom-prepared bootstraps, without any A20 subroutine.